Free Flash Flood by Chris Ryan Page B

stairwell, so she put down her box, crossed to the window and opened it to talk to them.
    Two of the men climbed in without waiting to be invited, muddy water dripping off their boots.
    The owners were a bit surprised, but then it all turned very strange indeed. For, shockingly, unbelievably, rather than helping them, one of the men pointed a stubby handgun at them.
    The woman felt the blood drain from her face.
    ‘Stay quiet and no one will get hurt,’ said the gunman. Rain dripped off his yellow coat onto the pale carpet.
    The other burglar pushed past them and went over to pick up the box on the sofa.
    ‘Hand over your valuables and no one gets hurt,’ said the gunman. He nudged the woman with the stubby end of the weapon and she whimpered.
    Reluctantly her husband stood back, letting them take the box. The burglar turned it upside down. The slim black jewellery boxes fell out on top of the passports and certificates. He picked up the jewellery and stashed it in his jacket pockets. He left the rest, and gestured to his partner.
    ‘That’s it. All done here.’
    ‘See?’ said the gunman. ‘Painless if you let us get on with it.’
    And the intruders climbed back out of the window and joined their partner in the boat.
    As they started up the engine, they could hear the woman sobbing.
    ‘Better get away from here,’ said the gunman. ‘She’s screaming the place down and the neighbours might hear.’
    The other man took the jewel cases out of his pockets and put them in a rucksack on the floor of the boat.
    The burglars had been at a boat show in Earl’s Court when the flood struck. As well as the small motorboat they’d got the yellow coats, some binoculars – and the flare pistol, which was proving extremely useful. Since then, they had visited so many people that afternoon, all of them rescuing their valuables from their safes; all of them sitting ducks for burglars.
    The gunman was now focusing the binoculars down the street. ‘I think our next stop should be that big house at the end of the road,’ he said. ‘I can see a lady waiting for us with a leather briefcase …’

Chapter Fifteen
     
    Bel was not at Charing Cross, waiting for Ben.
    She wanted to be, but she was still stuck in Westminster – though at the present moment she wasn’t quite sure where in Westminster.
    The room was small – about five metres square. It contained a desk, a telephone and several chairs. It reminded Bel of a dentist’s waiting room, except she had never been in a waiting room that had blank concrete walls and no windows. The only thing to look at was the two sets of doors.
    One set led to a stairwell. That’s where they had come in. The other doors were massive and thick,with steel bars and rivets. They reminded Bel of the blast doors she had seen in the Tube.
    One minute she had been in a meeting room in the Cabinet Office, waiting for the Prime Minister of Canada to arrive and talking to Clive Brooks and Sidney Cadogan, his boss from the Department of the Environment.
    The next minute some alarms had gone off and a plainclothes policeman had come in and asked them to follow him.
    He had ushered them into a corridor full of security men – plainclothes policemen with handguns bulging under their jackets. They were searching the offices and evacuating any members of staff they found.
    Bel and the others were escorted to a door with a sign on it saying ‘ NO ADMITTANCE ’. The Foreign Secretary, Madeleine Harwood, was already waiting there. She was a plump woman in a tweed suit, but not the trendy kind; it was the kind worn by fierce headmistresses. The ‘ NO ADMITTANCE ’ door was unlocked and they were told to go through.
    Bel thought it must be a bomb scare. She followed a policeman and Sidney Cadogan down a narrowflight of concrete stairs that went down and down and down. Madeleine Harwood puffed behind, complaining that she was getting dizzy.
    The policeman was waiting for them beside another open door,